Gnubbs Blog

As I stated before, I really enjoy driving this car on the dirt. Last night I was out scouting places for some photography and discovered just how neccesary a skid plate is for dirt road driving. I was cruising down a dirt road at a very reasonable speed when I saw another road that joined with my road at a sharp angle. This would make the turn from my perspective about 150 degrees with a bit of sharp descent mixed in for fun.

When I took the turn I cut a little closer than I should have it turns out and the quick descent onto the side road caused my suspension to fully compress and my front end to hit the ground. I stopped looked under the car for signs of any damage and luckily there was none. With a little worse luck I could have done some real damage to my car (oil pan was the big concern in this situation). Looking around the web it looks like I can get a nice set of front and rear skip plates for about $200. That is a lot cheaper than loosing an oil pan. Or an entire under body made of carbon fiber and kevlar for like $600, but that is a lot more than I need.

On the bright side, I had a pile of fun on this drive. Spent about an hour entirely on well maintained dirt roads. I swear this thing handles better on the dirt than the cougar did on pavement. A fun days driving.

gnubbs

This past saturday I stripped most of the badging off of the back of my WRX. Yeah, I know that it is a tuner thing to do but I think that the trunk lid looks a lot better with just the WRX logo — not the subaru or imprezza logos. Anyways, that is not the point of this posting. After using fishing line to get off the plastic badges, I was trying to use Bug and Tar remover to get off the adhesive that was left behind. My thought was “how much different can tar be from goo?” It turns out quite a bit different. After about an hour of work, having gotten basically no where, I decided to run to the hardware store and buy some actual Goo Gone.

As I walk out of the hardware store, I notice that there is a black ‘04 STi sitting next to my car. As I walk up to my car, this guys makes a comment that I have a nice car. I thank him, and ask if the STi is his. It is and I spend about 15 minutes talking to Rick(?) about the cars. He informs me that he hangs out with a lot of guys from AWDPirates.net and says that I should check them out. He had just got back from meeting up with everyone for breakfast and what I am guessing was a very fast sunday morning drive.

It is pretty funny that I have owned my car for only a week now, and I was already discovered and invited to the local enthuists club. I will have to keep my eye open and go out with them for the next cruise. The real question though, is Do they have a clubhouse? Hopefully with a hydraulic lift and machine shop.

gnubbs

Today I went out to lunch, scarfed down my food as fast as I could and went out for a drive with the remainder of my hour. First, in answer to the rev limiter questions out there — it is definately at 7300 rpm and the bounce off it is not subtle. I had to let off the gas at this point so I didn’t see how quickly it would recover.

The drive itself was a bit of a recon mission. My normal lunch bike ride includes about 3 miles or dirt road. Today I went to see how my car would behave on gravel and dirt on that road. Unfortunately most of the road has serious pot holes and washboarding which prevented me from having too much fun. Actually I probably will not subject my car to that again anytime soon. There was once nice stretch with a right hand turn followed by a long smooth straight. There is something just right about pushing hard through the turn, all four wheel sliding and then having all of them grab hard when I hit the gas out of it.

The subaru symetrical all wheel drive system is truely amazing. Taking a 90 degree turn at 30mpg on gravel and being able to go WOT as I wind out of the turn is awesome. You aren’t going to see me with this car slammed to the ground running slicks any time soon. If I wanted a street racer I would have bought an M3. This machine was meant to take whatever conditions I throw at it and I am going to make sure that I never take from that.

gnubbs

Note — Running through lunch so you can get out and drive is a great sign that you bought the right car.

So, my cougar was running with something around 165 horse power. My WRX at stock boost is running at around 227 HP. For some reason I was hoping that by some miracle of engine efficiency the WRX would get similar mileage as the cougar.

I am sorely mistaken. I haven’t done the math to see what MPG I am currently getting yet, but using my old refilling habits I already see that I am burning a great deal more gas. Way more power and AWD add up I guess. To add salt to the wound, the car also requires 91 octane at minimum. Apparently the Jspec version of my car is nearly identical except that it’s ECU is programmed to run on Japanese premium gas. Japanese premium gas is at least 100 octane and between the better feul and the ECU programming the JSpec car puts out 280 HP. 60 HP from better gas and changes to the programming of the ECU. Nothing more.

It sucks that I will have to fill up at least once a week now, but it is definately worth it. J$ and gryhrt — no I haven’t bounced off my rev limiter yet. I got my car up to 7500 rpm at lunch today, but still didn’t hit it. Will have to find a longer stretch of road.

gnubbs

As I posted a minute ago, I bought an ‘03 WRX this weekend. Here are the details on the car and some of my first impressions. I will start with the least important details and move onto the items of substance.

• It’s yellow. You buy a used car, you get it in the color they have. In my case they had yellow.
• The ride is pretty quiet and pretty comfortable. It is much more quiet on the road than the cougar was.
• In dash 6 disk CD changer. This sounds nice, but it makes it difficult to add in my iPod. More details to come later.
• Interior fit and finish is pretty good. A lot nicer than I remember Subarus having in the past. Lots of aluminum looking trim and a couple of nice delighters. Two cup-holders in the front seat. One barely fits a can of pop, the other barely fits a 20oz bottle. Only two.
• Interior is mostly dark grey/black with a blue pattern on the seats.
• Nice pedals. Nice shift knob and boot. Guages are nice, although I would have put the tach in the middle and the speedo on the right. But, most people expect for the speedometer to be the most prominant gauge.
• It has the smaller intercooler scoop in the hood, and a normal sized rear spoiler. I might upgrade to the STi sized scoop so that I can mount the nice air splitters and intercooler sprayer noozles.

Getting into the more important stuff.

• Very nice well bolstered seats. These really provide a lot of lateral support when cornering hard.
• 2.0L DOHC Flat Four, 8.00:1 compression
• Turbo. It hits 0.1 MPa under hard acceleration, which is about 14.5 psi.
• The optional turbo gauge. This is nice gauge in a heavy rubber body that is mounted on the top of the steering column on the right side.
• Brand new Potenza RE92 tires. Wouldn’t be my choice, but at least they are new.
• Very nice feeling transmission. Very tight. It goes into gear with a very nice feeling click. Short throws, just a couple of inches between gears. I have pull of the boot because this might be a short throw kit.
• Very nice, stiff clutch. This is a huge difference from my old clutch which was mushy and provided no feedback.
• A TurboXS after market boost controller with a cockpit switch for hi/lo boost.
• Factory STi exhaust. This is an expensive upgrade (~$1000) on this car when new. Nice, very low pitch exhaust sound without being outlandish.

This car is a great deal of fun to drive. It is very, very different from my Cougar with it’s V6. The boxxer has kind of a funny engine sound, but I think that I will dig it once I am used to it. The turbo sound is very noticable, and even the stock blow off valve makes me feel like I am in the Fast and the Furious every time I hear it.

The car is fast. Like fast, fast. It is definately sluggish off the line, but once the turbo spools up it really pulls hard. First gear redlines at about 45 mph. Second at 61mph. Since my inlaws have been in town I haven’t seen how fast it’s 0-60 time feels, but 0-40 is amazingly quick. Cornering is a big change as well. It tracks nicely through the turn, and then the AWD shines as you accelerate out. I have a lot to learn about driving this car.

I have it running factory boost at the moment. I have a bit of research to do before I start playing with the boost controller. I am very excited about this car and having a blast driving it.

gnubbs

So, this past Friday night I went out and bought myself the car that I have been wanting for quite a while. I got a 2003 Subaru WRX with 25,000 miles on it. The car buying process went way too easy, so I think that I might have been able to fight harder and get a better deal. The dealership had two cars I was interested in, a 2002 wagon that was right in my price range and a 2003 sedan that was a bit out of my price range.

I figured I would start trying to negotiate with them on the ‘03 and if I couldn’t get them to come down into my price range I would I switch to the ‘02. Well, things didn’t work out quite how I expected.

First the trade-in. It was a ‘99 Mercury Cougar V6. There were a couple of dents and scratches, two chips in the windshield, a broken sunroof, and it needed a new clutch. On top of that the service light on it was stuck on and the break wear warning light was on. They came back offering me blue book for the car in that condition. I told them that was a deal breaker and was ready to move onto the other car. I told them I needed way more for the Cougar, so they offered me an additional two grand. This brought thier offer up almost to the private party value of that car. That sounded good, so it was time to talk about the sticker on the WRX.

Well, this didn’t go as I expected at all. No going back and forth. No walking out. They told me what the financed amount would be with the trade-in, trade-in payoff, fees and taxes. It was about 3 grand more than I was in the market for. I told them that wouldn’t work and gave them an offer I expected them to refuse, but that would put me really close to how much I could afford to finance. Our sales lady came back with the manager who showed me how much they “paid” for the car. He said if he gave it to me for that, then they would be close to how much I wanted to pay. I bought it. That brought the price down to $800 more than I wanted to finance, but that was acceptable to me and Stephanie.

So, I got them to give me $2k over blue book for my car. I got the WRX for ~3k below blue book. I think they were hoping to add on a bunch of extras to make back thier money on warrenties and other add-ins. I didn’t bite. I wouldn’t let them sell me anything other than the car. The financing guy didn’t seem too happy about that, but that is my job.

I am sure they made front end money somewhere. I financed through them, so they make back end money there. However, I left the dealership feeling like a got a good deal. I am sure I got screwed somewhere in this equation, but it was subtle enough that they at least let me think that I did a good job. I know for sure that I made off with a better deal than when I bought my Cougar.

gnubbs

So, I am going to the car dealer tonight to try and buy a car. The dealer has two cars I liked, a 2003 WRX sedan and a 2002 WRX Wagon. The 2003 only has 25k miles on it, and the STI exhaust. The 2002 has 40k miles on it, and a Blitz turbo timer but everything else is stock.

The 2003 is listed outside my budget, but I am hoping that I can talk them down enough to make it affordable. Depends on a lot of things, but mostly on how low they will go on the price and how much they will give me for my Cougar.

This is a game that I really hate playing. I am generally a pretty straight forward guy. Ask me a question and I will pretty much always just give the complete answer. When bargaining though, even though I really like the 2003, I have to pretend like I don’t. I can’t lay out how much I want to put down or how much I think the car is actually worth. Everything is a sleight. I say I can’t go above $12k for the car, they say they can’t go under $19k. Well, maybe I could do $14k……

It’s just not the type of person that I am. The flip side is that I am also not the type of person who will pay sticker for a car. So, there is a good chance that 8 hours from now I will be driving a WRX with the pedal to the floor. There is also just as likely of chance that I will be cursing that miserly car dealership and drinking burbon.

gnubbs

This evening I am going to be out test driving cars. Hopefully I will find the perfect car at the perfect price and I can buy it tomorrow. I doubt that will happen though so posts about this will probably continue for a while.

I was about to add a new car to my list to test drive, but I had a very funny conversation with the local Saab dealership. The Saab 9-2x Aero (aka the Saabaru) is a WRX wagon with a nicer interior and Saab badging. The car lists at $28k, but with GMs current discounts they are selling them here for $19k. That is a really good deal. However, the dealership is currently sold out. They are expecting more in next week, but the guy said that they are expecting all of them to sell out and have been taking downpayments on them already.

So, if I want a Saabaru I would have to buy it sight unseen. No test drive. Nothing. If I can’t find a used WRX that I like I might do it, but there is just something wrong about buying a car that I have never driven before. Unless it is a Lotus, but that day has not yet come.

gnubbs

I have once again decided that I am going to be buying a new car in the near future. I have come to this conclusion a couple of times in the past, but I think this time it is for real because on Friday I will finally have enough to make a decent down payment sitting in my checking account. So, I have been doing some research, I have my budget pretty much set, and it is time to start looking at cars.

The first up was a 2003 WRX with 45k miles on it. I basically was test driving this car because it was convinient and I wanted to get my hands on a WRX for the first time. When I got to the dealership I realized that who ever has last owned this car had spent some money on it. Nice Konig 17″ rims with Michelin Pilot rubber, Perrin fuel rails, Perrin dual stage boost controller with a high/low boost switch in the cockpit, a TurboXS blowoff valve, and a cat-less exhaust. There definately could have been more, but those where the mods that stood out.

This was a very, very fun car to drive relative to my current car. It feels faster than my Cougar before I even get past the turbo lag. Once the turbo kicks in the car really takes off. I had the sales rep in the car, so I couldn’t unwind it too far but at low speeds the car was very quick. Cornering was dramatically better than my current car. It held a decent speed turn very well, and acceration out of the turn was incredibly smooth.

Yeah, the blowoff valve made the car sound absolutely comical. The exhaust that was on the car was nice and low, but not overly loud. Did you catch the part above about the cat-less exhaust? Unfortunately that means it won’t pass emissions but that is something the dealer would have to fix before they could sell the car.

To be honest I am not sure how I feel about all of the after market parts on this car. That means who ever owned this car probably drove it pretty hard. It is hard to tell how well he did this work. The engine is not running stock boost, but there is no boost gauge on it. So, I am going to keep looking.

I played all of the after market parts off to the salesperson as something that made me less interested in the car. They were saying they could get me into a new WRX for around $21-22k, so I might be able to get them to give me a good price on the used one. First, I have some more cars to drive.

I am planning on driving a stock WRX, probably an Audi A4 and TT, and maybe a Golf TDI. The requirements? I want a car that is no bigger than a 4 door coupe (no full size sedans), all wheel drive, and it has to be fun to drive. Yeah, the TDI is not AWD but that 50mpg is aweful attractive with gas prices these days. I am looking for something used at around the $18k mark (including taxes and fees). That puts me at about $16,500 before taxes and crap.

gnubbs

The Eiger Sanction
The Eiger Sanction is in my opinion the best climbing movie made prior to Touching the Void. Sure it is from the 70’s and shows it’s age. However, there is a ton of climbing in it. There is also Clint Eastwood playing Dr. Hemlock an international asassin and mountain climber. The scenario is that he has to go climb the Nordwand of the Eiger and “sanction” one of his fellow climbers. Best line: “Does your physical disability preclude you from getting to the point.”

The (International) Noise Conspiracy — Armed Love
Armed Love is The (International) Noise Conspiracy’s newest album. The production quality of this album is leaps and bounds above thier prior albums. I am guessing that having Rick Rubin produce it had something to do with that. It is not quite as rock and roll as thier earlier albums, but is still extremely good. Best Line: “Let’s all share our dreams under a communist moon”.

Alkaline Trio — Crimson
What a bunch of pop crap. This is too bad. I really like everything this band has done up till now. Then they release this. Oh well. I guess pop must be a seductive misstress because she lures in some otherwise great bands.